Putin to Trump on ‘Vastly’ Improved Ukraine Peace Plan: Nyet

The good news: Those who lamented Donald Trump’s 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine have reason to cheer. After news leaked this morning that Ukraine had accepted a newly negotiated version of the plan, the details emerged on the “vastly” improved proposal. Gone were the territorial concessions, and the cap on Ukraine’s military got raised significantly in the new 19-point plan:

A new version of a peace plan worked out between senior Washington and Kyiv delegations is proving more palatable to Ukrainians — and would remove several provisions that were previously described by US officials as “maximalist demands” by Moscow.

The new plan, said to include about 19 points, would nix one of the most controversial provisions of the 28-point plan reported last week — that Ukraine would have to give up territory in the Donbas that Russia has been unable to conquer in more than 11 years of war there, The Post can reveal.

Instead, the issue of territorial claims will be left to President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to hammer out at a later date, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

It would also get rid of another sticking point under which Ukraine would have had to promise never to join NATO — a goal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has sought since before invading the country in 2022.

These address some of the sharpest criticisms of Trump’s original 28-point plan. Those provisions sparked outrage among supporters of Ukraine in both parties, claiming that it amounted to appeasement of Vladimir Putin. The issue of NATO membership in the original plan was mainly countered with the security guarantees in the first plan, which called for direct US and European engagement in the event of a new Russian invasion, guarantees that were more explicit than in the 1993 Budapest Memo that had left enough ambiguity that the Biden administration had felt comfortable in refusing to order troops into Ukraine. The remaining Donbas territory likely would have been tough to keep, even if Ukraine still controls it militarily, given that the Donbas is primarily an ethnic-Russian territory. 

And that brings us to … the bad news: 

Russia is set to reject the new 19-point cease-fire deal drafted by the US and Ukraine but may use disinformation tactics  to keep President Trump engaged in continued talks — suggesting the war will last at least through Christmas, sources told The Post on Tuesday. …

But sources told The Post that Russia won’t agree to the 19-point version, as they already weren’t completely satisfied with the broader previous plan.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly went on the offensive Tuesday, reiterating that Moscow will not outright support any plan that deviates from Trump’s original 28-point proposal.

There are two reasons that anyone could have predicted this – one of which is the Trump administration’s fault, and the other is the facts on the ground. The White House screwed up by formulating this proposal without first incorporating Ukraine’s input in full. By making a public spectacle of the 28-point plan first, which was clearly developed based on Russian demands for ending the war, Trump’s team made it look as though they had already sided with the Russians on all these points, and his initial insistence on adoption by Zelensky before Thursday strongly suggested that Ukraine would have to end the war on Moscow’s terms if they wanted it to end now. 

Sergei Lavrov emphasized this in his statement after news of the new 19-point proposal emerged today:

Lavrov sought to contrast the latest plan with discussions between Trump and Putin at the August summit in Anchorage — implying that the Kremlin came away from the meeting with the idea that Trump had agreed to side with Moscow.

“After Anchorage, when we thought these understandings had already been formalized, there was a long pause. And now the pause has been broken by the introduction of this document. . . A whole series of issues there, of course, require clarification,” Lavrov said.

However, the other failure here is the failure by Trump’s critics to understand the reality of the war. Trump may have discounted Ukraine’s concerns in attempting to find a way to stop the war, but his critics and European leaders are discounting Russia’s interests and their position on the ground. There is a certain unreality about the idea that a peace plan will do what war hasn’t, which is to convince Russia to retreat. Vladimir Putin has no desire to end the war without achieving his core goals of the invasion, which are – at a minimum – to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and to re-incorporate the majority-ethnic Russian territory back into Russia proper. 

Putin wants more than that, of course, but he won’t agree to stop until both of those goals are guaranteed, no matter how many more men he’ll lose in the fight. Putin doesn’t have the same frame of mind as the West does in that regard, nor does he face domestic pressure to end the war even after nearly four years of a quagmire. Trump’s new sanctions have begun to bite and Putin has dissipated a significant amount of his financial reserves already, but it will still be a long time before he’ll have to stop throwing men onto the pyre in the hope that Ukraine will finally break. The “vast” improvements took both of Putin’s core demands back off the table, so it’s no surprise that his response to the new plan has been nyet.

Trump understands this too, even if he bungled the leverage in this round. The “vastly” improved 19-point plan may look better than Trump’s 28-point plan, but looks don’t matter if the plan doesn’t produce an agreement. Style points don’t matter. However, the good news may be that we can use both plans to push both Ukraine and Russia to make the painful decisions that will bring a secure peace in Ukraine … even if justice won’t be on the table. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.

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